2010 Year in Review: A push for collaboration within the UC industry

Not a day goes by when some company announces they've certified their devices with another company's. Interoperability is key in the VoIP world and these one-to-one testing and certification moves are integral for companies making decisions about which products to buy whether they are just upgrading piece by piece or overhauling their whole communications systems. With so many companies, devices, protocols and uses for IP communications, there is no end to the need for compatibility.

One of the major interoperability announcements of the year was the UCIF--an attempt by some industry leaders to form partnerships are across the board interoperability testing to streamline the whole process. HP, Juniper Networks, Microsoft, Logitech/LifeSize, and Polycom joined together to found the Unified Communications Interoperability Forum (UCIF), a group dedicated to enabling standards-based, inter-vendor UC interoperability. A growing number of companies joined  these companies in the forum including: Acme Packet, Aspect, AudioCodes, Broadcom, BroadSoft, Brocade, ClearOne, Jabra, Plantronics, RADVISION, Siemens Enterprise Communications, and Teliris. The UCIF is seeking to move the industry from bilateral interoperability testing to multilateral interoperability testing. Companies stand to save money by moving to the multilateral testing approach and the industries customers will get an easy to identify indicator of interoperability with a UCIF stamp of approval.

As with any technology ecosystem where companies are competing for the same customers, there are challenges to interoperability. Some key players like Cisco and Avaya were missing from the UCIF. UC Strategies analyst Don Van Doren see that the UCIF is off to a good start by not wanting to develop standards and instead focusing on encouraging the use of standards while providing testing and certification. However, he wondered about the commitments of its members, since with individual companies looking out for their own interests, sometimes the idea of something being good for everyone doesn't always look that way to competitors. Sometimes, interoperability is a matter of putting customer concerns ahead of a company's personal preference to box out their competitors and realize that sometimes companies are going to want to mix and match--sampling all the great products our industry has to offer.